The Acceptor's Trade
Source Code covered the front of the agentic pipeline — getting truth out of a person and into the machine. This is the back. The agent finishes, hands back a clean diff, and walks off, and responsibility for code nobody you can ask wrote returns to you. You stop being the author and become the signer.
Signing for work you didn't make is a different craft from making it — and an old one. Five professions have practiced it to the point of ritual: the engineer who stamps, the attending who countersigns, the editor at the fact-checking desk, the auditor who samples, the inspector who re-checks. One developer going to school on all five, because the skill he always filed under overhead turns out to be the job.
The house rule, kept from Source Code: a number, its source, and its limit, in the same breath. Every statistic travels with what it can't support. Vendor claims are named as vendor claims — and the optimistic ones are distrusted as hard as the alarmist ones. Where the experiment this argument wanted doesn't exist, the text says so. The central claim — that agent output is legacy code at birth — is carried as the claim this series defends, not a finding proved by repeating it.
Legacy Code at Birth
The agent hands back clean, passing, authorless code — and the clean surface is the problem, because what you've inherited is legacy code thirty seconds old. Accepting it is an old senior skill, moved from the margins to the middle of the bench. The map. The other pieces are the territory.
The Surface Lies
Your at-a-glance read of code quality was never reading quality — it was reading the author. Strip the author out and the instinct keeps firing, confidently, on nothing.
The Thing That Isn't There
Every line in the diff checks out and the change is still wrong, because the bug is the check that was never written — and you can't review an absence.
You Can't Read It All
Past a certain size, review stops working by construction, and the agent hands you that size on demand. Decide in advance what gets read deeply and what gets sampled.
The Cold Desk
The agent worked in a warm sandbox, then handed back a flat diff and threw the world away. The fix is a handback contract: the older trades refuse work that doesn't arrive inspectable.
What We Can't Tell You Yet
A series about accepting work you can't fully verify owes the same honesty about itself. Here's what we looked for and didn't find — and why the gaps are the argument.